With all the fear and fatigue surrounding covid, I thought we might remind each other of the positive aspects of this tiresome pandemic...

Admiration of health care workers
Appreciation of educators
Smaller class sizes
Less clutter (for those who have been inspired to deep clean)
Better organization (see above)
Completion of random projects (or abandonment of same)
Tidier outdoor spaces
More reading
More time with immediate household
More time with pets, hopefully resulting in better behaved animals

Chime in with positive thoughts.

Appreciation for all who wear masks and practice social distancing.

One benefit is that nobody in my family has gotten sick once since quarantining and all the mask-wearing.

Realising that the comfort of not wearing a bra since February means I just cannot go back to wearing one ever again. I am so much more confident about not wearing one now because I know many women who have ditched their bras forever since the lockdown in March but I haven't consciously seen someone and thought "she's not wearing a bra", so I can be pretty sure that nobody has noticed me either.

Environmental benefits of less travel.
Made me get more exercise.
Got in touch with neighbors, shared resources.

Being forced to slow down
has given me time to think about what is really important in life
A good reassessing of my priorities ,
where I spend or waste my time.
also where I spend or waste my money.

Life will be different after all this ,
For me I believe it will be better because of better choices.

I have gained :

compassion
patience
understanding
flexibility
appreciation
empathy
deeper faith

I'll second the "completion of random projects". I got some work done this year that I've wanted to do for a long time but just never had the time to focus on. For example:

- Painted trim in some hallways.
- Repainted a hallway and my home office.
- Complete terrarium rebuild for one of my geckos.
- Did some organizing and packaged a bunch of stuff to donate at a later date once the pandemic calms down.

I'm currently in a mandatory 14-day quarantine because I travelled to visit my partner for a month. Given I'm stuck in the house for the time, I decided to get some aesthetic work done on my indoor plants. Cleaned the exteriors of a lot of my succulent pots that had gotten muddy from being outside for the summer, and a bunch of them got top dressings. Really cleans them up and makes the plants stand out more.

we have had a real Xmas tree for decades, and colored mini lights. Well, with this mess, we put off shopping until none were left. Since we are dogsitting for a friend who's traveling, I figured they might lend us their fake tree. Better= they gave us their second fake tree because they had upsized. Now we got a 6 foot tree with all white lights. Perfect size for us, I am liking the no mess, no water aspect, and easy to hang ornaments. I started with all white, silver, gold and red ones and decided to stick with that color scheme- we married in December and used red in our wedding. So from the 'ashes' of failing to find a tree, we now have a new start and just the right tree for the next few decades.

People discovering what's really important to them.
Greater appreciation of nature and the outdoors.
Having switched to working from home, many people won't go back to the office, which means hours of their day liberated from commuting, and less traffic congestion and pollution in the cities.
While that's bad for downtown coffee shops and impulse retailers, a lot of working people will spend less on frivolous purchases.
We're learning to appreciate some of the lowest-paid workers who keep our world going all the time, but whom we never noticed before -
- more to the point, they're learning their own worth.
Governments and corporations are faced with complicated decisions - which means the people in charge of those giant entities have to think, really think, about what makes a society viable - and what doesn't.

(For me personally, there's very little change and no improvement.)